Written and Directed by local Houston filmmaker Jenny Waldo, Acid Test follows “Jenny” as she launches a rebellion against her family, fueled by Riot Grrrl punk music, crushes, and lsd.

Adapted from an award-winning short film of the same name that’s currently in festivals, we are bringing back the fabulous Juliana DeStefano as Jenny and Mia Ruiz as her mom Camila. Learn more at acidtestfilm.com.

The feature film is an activist film. With a female lead character of Mexican descent, our story showcases much-needed diversity on screen. We are also showcasing that diversity behind the camera, with our female writer/director, it is vital to be part of the changes needed in the industry by hiring women and people of color in crew positions. The film is funded through charitable donations made through our fiscal sponsor.

Casting Breakdown:

Jack (40s) – Caucasian – Jack is Jenny’s father. Undiagnosed bi-polar, he veers from being fun, charming, and sweet to domineering, controlling, and frightening. A good-ole Southern boy from Texas, he used his intelligence to pursue a life of excellence, starting with an education at Harvard. Now he uses everything in his arsenal to support his wife and children, creating every opportunity that can give them the best life possible. As Jenny starts to go in her own (different) direction, he feels personally rejected and struggles to reconnect with her as her own individual person.

Drea (18) – Open to all races/ethnicities. Drea is Jenny’s best friend and the reason why Jenny got into punk. A child of a single mom who works all the time to support her, Drea has had to raise herself and harden herself at a young age against the sometimes cruel realities of the world and abstains from all drugs and alcohol in order to remain sharp. As true adulthood looms, Drea is terrified to dream that she will be able to find anything better.

Owen (18) – Caucasian – Owen is on his way to being Jenny’s boyfriend. Fun-loving, take-nothing-seriously, Owen skateboards through life on being rich, charming, and smart enough to pass without studying. Hidden underneath that care-free attitude is a child who learned to mask his depression from his absent, high-society parents by taking any and all mind-altering substances and as he befriends Jenny, he takes her along for the ride. Bonus if you speak Spanish!

Kelly (18) – African-American – Kelly is Jenny’s best friend at school. Smarta, driven, she excels at everything and has no time for playing around. In a world that treats her as if she didn’t have to work twice as hard to show she’s just as good as the rest of her peers, her realism isn’t a loss of hope but a spark that drives her to make the system work for her.

Mrs. Scattergood (30s) – Open to all races/ethnicities. Jenny’s mentor and English teacher, Mrs. Scattergood shepherds Jenny through the college-application process and ensuing crisis when the plan for Harvard derails. As a woman with a physical disability, she shares her own journey with both parental and personal expectation and disappointment during the fraught teenage years.

Mrs. Walker (40s) – Open to all races/ethnicities. Mrs. Walker is Drea’s mom, the opposite of Jenny’s stay-at-home, perfect homemaker wife. As a single mom, she struggles with the failures of not being able to be there for her children, working as an ER nurse with crazy hours, and the failures at work when problems are going on at home. Her son managed to graduate, just barely, and already has had run-ins with the law and is out of the house, so she needs Drea to keep it together and make something of herself.

Isabel (40s-60s) – Latina/Hispanic. Isabel is Owen’s housekeeper, the only adult to love and care for him on a consistent daily basis. She does her best to provide the stability he needs converses with him in Spanish as she taught him growing up while maintaining a certain emotional distance the high-society family expects.

Michael (10) – Latino/Hispanic. Michael is Jenny’s little brother. Quiet, prone to sickness, and lost amid the big personalities of his sister and dad, Michael does his best to remain clueless and happy. He loves playing video games, drawing, and is just getting to that annoying-brother stage.

Mr. Jewel (50s) – Open to all races/ethnicities. Jenny’s history teacher who implores his students to vote in the upcoming Presidential election and challenges them to question the difference between change and progress. A born orator, he is as serious as he is inspirational.

Taxi Driver (40s-60s) – Male – Caucasian – A small but critical role, the Taxi Driver is gruff and intimidating and rescues Jenny from one bad situation only to place her in another.

]]>20 Year Anniversaryhttp://www.jennywaldo.com/2019/01/20-year-anniversary/
Tue, 08 Jan 2019 21:52:20 +0000http://www.jennywaldo.com/?p=901Continue Reading]]>20 years ago, this month, I had my first internship in the film industry. Twenty. Years. Ago. For what it’s worth, I wanted to put that journey down into words because I have no idea what to make of this amount of time and what I’ve been able and unable to do within it, but I recognize it as a milestone and an accomplishment.

When I entered Oberlin College in 1995 – still seventeen years old – I thought I would be a math and dance double major because I loved them both but I had NO IDEA what kind of a career I could make or would want other than the fact that I didn’t want an “office job” and I had a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment streak coupled with a desire to do something “important.” At the time, Oberlin’s recruiting posters boasted a picture of the globe and their tagline “Think one person can change the world? So do we.” And so that was what I was there to do, without any form to that desire.

I had come from the Washington, DC area where I’d been in public school my entire life until I fell in with the “wrong crowd” so my parents sent me to private school at Sidwell Friends for the last 3 years of high school during the Clinton years when Chelsea attended. It was a wild time, one for a different blog post, but Sidwell was able to pull me out of my nonsense – at least academically – and inspire a love of learning, an internal drive to produce content, and with its Quaker silent worship, it gave me some much-needed peace within my turbulent teenage mind. It was a world of privilege and ambition and when it came time to look at colleges, no one was looking at anything other than the top schools in the US and barely anyone was staying in the DC area for college, which is how I found myself at a top-25 liberal arts college 45 minutes outside of Cleveland, OH in a tiny – TINY – town with no car in the days when cell phones and wifi were nonexistent.

After nearly failing my post-Calculus math class and not liking the Dance Department at Oberlin, I needed to change my degree plans. So I opened up the (paper) catalogue, trying to find a department that had enough classes that caught my interest and could give me the credit hours needed to graduate and decided I would now be an English major. I was also pursuing pre-med requirements because I had loved the movie Gross Anatomy and I was attracted to the stress and challenge of a degree and career in medicine.

As my Math/Dance-now-English/Pre-Med plans showcase, I was pulled between two strengths: the analytical and the creative. I’d aways been involved in both, inspired by both, and my biggest struggle with answering the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was the fact that I didn’t want to pursue a career that only engaged in half my interests. My strongest grades academically were math and science but I’d grown up dancing in a professional ballet company, playing piano, and doing black-and-white photography (read more about adventures in photography HERE), and I wrote and journaled, obsessed with word choice and style of writing. While I hadn’t ever been the strongest reader, hated it as a child in fact, Sidwell and my summer reading choices had forged a love of the written word. So what kind of job or career could I carve from that?

In my Film & Video page, I summarize how a sophomore English class incorporated film theory in our reading material and the lightbulb in my brain exploded. I’d grown up watching movies, obsessed with television shows, MTV, but I’d never thought to “read” the moving image for content, theme, structure the way I would the books I read or even a photograph I took. In another case of absolute contradictions in my life, I’d grown up watching the mainstream sci-fi movies my dad loved – Star Wars, Star Trek – as well as the Czech New Wave and other films of the 60’s that my Czech-born mother had loved before she emigrated from the country in 1969 – Closely Watched Trains, Firemen’s Ball, Blow Up, Red Desert. Imagine Darth Vader meets mimes playing tennis matches! I loved blockbuster popcorn movies as much as I loved arthouse foreign films. A favorite of mine in high school was Agnes Varda’s Vagabond.

That summer, instead of writing down a photograph image I had in my head, I thought about what the story might be behind that photograph – who was this character, where had she just been, where was she going, what was she feeling? It became my first attempt at a screenplay.

I spent my junior year abroad – the fall semester in London, the spring semester in Prague – and immersed myself in living life, exploring the world, pushing past my comfort zone, but this idea of filmmaking had taken root and for the first time in my life, I had a direction to follow in pursuit of the future.

When I returned for senior year, I spent my winter term interning at Mandalay Pictures on the Paramount Lot. It was my first time on the west coast. I was staying with an Oberlin Alum who I’d never met. Every day was Christmas reading scripts, talking to people in the office, walking around the lot, getting free tickets to premieres, wandering around Los Angeles. During that time, a close family friend suddenly died. We’d been visiting her and her family over the holidays and the last thing I remember of her was her singing “Hooray for Hollywood” as we said our goodbyes – wishing me well in this new adventure. And now she was gone.

That was January 1999 – 20 years ago.

When I came back after that month-long internship to finish up my degree at Oberlin, this new direction I’d flirted with had only grown stronger. As I defended my Honors Thesis on viewer obsession, using my love of the movie Say Anything as the starting point, one of the reviewers asked me why I didn’t analyze the cinematography of the movie and how it contributed to my emotional involvement with the film. It was like a smack in the face. Not only did I need to analyze movies for their story, but I needed to consider the other factors that go into the experience – the cinematography, the editing, the sound, the music…There was more to learn and I was eager.

I moved out to Los Angeles 2 weeks after graduating Oberlin with honors. I bought my VERY FIRST CAR, found a sublet, brought my boyfriend, signed up for a summer course in Chemistry (continuing the pre-med flirtation) so my parents would support this adventure, and got my VERY FIRST CELL PHONE so that my parents could reach me. I figured that the people I’d met in January would help set me up with a job. But the person who had been the intern-coordinator no longer worked at Mandalay, and the assistants to the executives I had met changed, no one was returning my calls or emails, and I didn’t know anyone else. No one else. My boyfriend left to finish up his last year at Oberlin and as I signed a lease on an apartment in the UCLA area that I didn’t know how I’d be able to afford, I started to panic. PANIC. I didn’t know how to do this adulting thing and I was far far away from the people I could count on and I had no money.

I wonder what would have happened had I stayed. Found a job, outside of the industry, temped, whatever…and faced my anxiety.

But instead, I returned to Washington, DC, lived with my parents, and immediately found PAID WORK in the documentary/educational industry there. I had had research and corporate jobs during my college summers and I’d just been a student, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to do research for documentaries and along the way start learning some of the needs, skills, and jobs required for filmmaking. At the end of the day, we were still filming stuff and putting it together. It wasn’t Star Wars, but it was a start.

I remember talking with the crew members – technicians who felt pigeon-holed by their craft – and I worried that if I didn’t take charge and start pursuing a chosen direction in the field, my circumstances would start dictating my choices. (This was before the word “intentional” became popular for life choices.) I liked and respected documentaries, but they weren’t my passion and they weren’t my first choice. I needed to know more about filmmaking in general and I also desperately wanted to get out of DC. When my boyfriend graduated from Oberlin in 2000, I thought we could move up to New York City together because it A) wasn’t as far as LA, B) had a film industry, and C) had lots of friends. But after spending another summer driving up and back from DC and staying with friends, I was looking at making $25K per year in a very expensive city where you couldn’t find an apartment without guaranteeing $80K per year and it was difficult to couch-surf as a couple. We also didn’t love NYC the way our friends did. So I spent another year in DC working for local production companies and lucked out on finding one that was branching out into fictional feature films so I was able to get back to my Development roots and gain more experience as I applied to film schools to get me out of dodge and into the industry.

As I mention in the Film & Video page, I applied to several top masters programs in film and was rejected everywhere but USC and the London Film School. I’d only applied to USC because my father had suggested that I at least apply to the best school in the field (I also applied to NYU but was rejected) and I’d only applied to the London school because I loved London and wanted to live there again and I also loved Mike Leigh (Secrets & Lies, Naked, Topsy-Turvy) and thought anywhere that he’d gone would be amazing. My two main bosses in the two years I was in DC had also been USC Cinematic Arts alums. In the face of making an actual decision, I wanted to think ahead to this ephemeral career I wanted to build and thought that being in LA, the center of the film industry, where I could start building a network of people while learning the craft, would be my best shot at one day finding work. As a non-citizen, I also wasn’t sure what I would do for work in the UK during or after the program and USC was bigger and better funded with more resources and the “name” to go along with it, so any job would be easier to attain.

My boyfriend decided to move to LA with me and the cruel irony is that this last-minute decision ended up with him entering USC at the same time on a FULL RIDE with a PAID STIPEND as a teaching assistant to pursue his Masters in Geology. It was April and he hadn’t even applied for the program, was simply inquiring about a job, and they rushed him through the process. So…for anyone still reading…SCIENCE PAYS BETTER THAN ART when it comes to education and most likely after too.

I spent the next three years with one foot in my MFA film studies and one foot in the industry itself, one foot still in documentaries and the other in fiction. I knew that film school was neither a guarantee for a job nor a necessity for a career in the film industry, but it was a vehicle that got me back to LA and opened doors. I got a work study job in the film department researching for Doe Mayer, Jed Dannenbaum, and Carroll Hodge, 3 faculty members writing a book on Creative Filmmaking, which was an honor and an education in itself. I also started interning in the Development department at the now-defunct Intermedia Films which had opened an LA branch off the success of its London-based films like Sliding Doors and went on to do films like Adaptation, The Wedding Planner, Terminator 3, and K19 – The Widowmaker while I was there. Eventually I found paid work as a Reader, writing Coverage for submitted material for a couple different production companies including National Geographic Films when they still had an LA office.

I gave myself 1 year to explore USC and LA and decide whether I wanted to continue going into significant debt to stay at USC or jump ship and work full-time in LA. By the end of my first year at USC, I’d won one of the three annual scholarships they give out for directing – overhearing one of my male counterparts console another who had clearly been “robbed” – and while things were going well with my industry contacts, I had a good thing going overall and partial payment for my second year at USC.

I was shocked to discover that all my years of photography didn’t mean that I was a good cinematographer. I could find my frame, but I couldn’t necessarily keep it as people and objects moved across it, especially if the camera was moving too. I also had been more of a photo-journalist, using available light, and knew nothing about how to properly light anything. I was pleasantly surprised that my years playing piano made me a good music editor, but I had no desire to go into sound – though I’d been told it was the most secure career path. As a writer/director, I wanted to edit as my “job” while I pursued my dreams, but as I went into my second year where students are required to crew on a thesis-level project that is funded by the department and produced under the purview of a course and faculty members for each production role, I found no one wanted me as an editor. All the upper-level directors already had editors in mind, but no one had producers. One of my friends in the program mentioned to someone that I had producing experience from my two years prior to USC and suddenly I was in demand. No one wanted to produce, I think because it wasn’t considered “creative.” Fearing being pigeon-holed, I resisted, but in the end decided to produce a documentary thesis film Unsyncables At Any Age.

Producing was exactly the job I needed to take to get over my lingering fears and insecurities over pursuing filmmaking. Taking the producing course with Lisa Leeman gave me the knowledge and the confidence to pick up the phone and ask for things, to make the production happen, instead of waiting for the work to come to me, instead of waiting to be picked. I didn’t need permission anymore.

There were people at USC who were on their fourth or fifth year there, taking 1-credit courses to finish their thesis films, and I didn’t want to do that. 3 years already seemed like a long time to be back in school for a career that didn’t require it, so I limited my course choices to pursue the thesis track. My only regrets were never taking an editing course with Norm Hollyn and the advanced directing course with Jeremy Kagan. Highlights were the Visual Aesthetics class with Bruce Block, the screenwriting course on sequence structure, and the relationships I developed with my professors like Doe and Jed, Liz Gill, and Wendy Apple – who hired me to research and eventually segment produce on the feature documentary The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing. I also built a solid group of friends and peers, producing the super 16mm thesis film The Fist of Iron Chef and another independent short before putting together my own 35mm thesis film Searching for Angels.

Shooting my thesis film was a highlight of its own. There was a pre-thesis film Jenny and a post-thesis film Jenny. It was definitely transformational in ways I’m not sure I can totally describe. It’s like testing yourself and your ideas without much of a safety net and getting through to the other side is not only a learning experience but it provides a confidence that in-class projects never can.

In pre-production, I don’t remember sleeping. At all. I would spend the entire day pulling together everything needed for the shoot, and every night, my brain would be racing with ideas and energy. It was the start of my long-lasting coping mechanism: binging on content. I had never seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer. By 2003, it was near the end of its reign and I was interested in the hype so I rented the DVD for each season at my local video store and would binge-watch episodes all night before passing out for a couple of hours and then getting up to do it all over again. Luckily, my boyfriend was in Australia on some Geology trip and I didn’t have time to get jealous because I WAS MAKING A MOVIE ON 35MM FILM! I had an amazing cast and crew and wonderful friends who supported and helped out. There were only 2 hiccups. One was the 1st AC hired who kept talking about how he’d turned down a lucrative AC gig for MTV in order to do my project and was such a diva on set – slowing us down, being disrespectful – that I ended up firing him. The other was my post-sound guy who asked for money once he had started working on the project, held my hard drives of the footage hostage, and when he showed me the “work” he had done it was beyond sub-par so…bye bye.

And then my expectations of the film were wildly unrealistic. I didn’t have much of a plan of attack for distributing the film because A) there were fewer resources for indie distribution, especially shorts back then, B) they don’t teach distribution or even festivals in film school, and C) I was relying on my brilliance and the USC brand to get me into Sundance. Or bust. If it wasn’t Sundance, it would be nothing; so when I didn’t get accepted to Sundance, I didn’t apply anywhere else. And that is probably one of my biggest regrets from film school.

I’m always wondering whether I did enough, made enough out of each opportunity, and I know that I could have done much more during my time in LA and at USC. I could have worked on more projects, built my network more. I’ve always been selective with what I worked on and who I worked with and there were many people I wanted to work with and never had the opportunity to for one reason or another. The social aspects of the film industry are wily and hard to navigate. And the partying…leads to many questionable choices, especially if there’s a power dynamic. In some ways, having a boyfriend who wasn’t in the industry helped me with a work-life balance and in some ways kept me from fully engaging. The same was true with my internships and part-time work – I didn’t place as much value on my peer network as I did on the people I thought could get me a job. But eventually, your peers become the people who can hire you.

I ended up in a very strange situation where I was promised a job to replace someone who didn’t know that they were getting fired. Everyone else in the office knew that this person was getting fired, and everyone knew I was supposed to take the job after. Months went by in this weird limbo and it did not feel good. But it was the opportunity I’d been working towards for over a year and it was the best option I had. By the time winter break rolled around, though, nothing had changed and I didn’t trust the executive who promised that “great things were coming” and another contact had put me in touch with a woman newly hired by one of the studios to head up their Story Department (the studio version of Development) who needed an assistant. I was hired immediately and said my goodbyes to the other company. But this new boss of mine was stressed from trying to fix a struggling studio’s project lineup and we ended up not being a good professional match. It was one of those iconic industry relationships where the assistant gets screamed at all the time, questioned, belittled and by the end of my first week I was fired. FIRED! I was blindsided by how badly things went over such a short period of time. Literally, stunned. I know I made mistakes, but after working for a lot of different and difficult people in a variety of jobs, I know it was really her and not me.

Still, it was a psychological blow.

I’d been carefully cultivating and evaluating each step I was taking, each choice, and I ended up with nothing. I couldn’t go back to my previous company and the shock of getting fired after a whirlwind week with a psychotic boss left me adrift. There were things that needed to get done – my thesis film was in post and I was planning my July wedding. So while temping and watching too much television and trying not to sink into a deep depression, I finished my film, produced my friend’s 35mm thesis film Pebbles, and planned to get married in July.

Right before graduation, my soon-to-be-husband got a job with Shell Oil and let me in on a little secret: he was in serious credit card debt from graduate school. Even though he had no tuition to pay, his stipend didn’t cover housing and other school/food/living expenses and while we weren’t frivolous, LA isn’t cheap, and we were enjoying our time there. I wish wish wish, if I could go back, that I could hit pause on this moment – get some therapy, get some couples counseling, put a hold on the wedding, and think about what I wanted to do professionally and personally after 3 years of hard work at USC and in LA. But after getting fired by the crazy lady, I wasn’t in the best head space and I liked finishing my plans, so marriage in July was it and then I would stay in LA to look for work and figure all that other stuff out while my husband would go to New Orleans to try out this Oil and Gas life.

And then I got pregnant on the honeymoon. Stupid hormones! Stupid mindset! Stupid love! If you ever want to throw a bomb on your life, take a tenuous and confusing situation and add a baby.

How could I look for production work knowing in 9 months I’d be having a baby? How could I have a baby at this moment when everything I’d been working towards was about to become a reality? No one has babies in the industry. People treat their dogs like their infants and I have literally spent an afternoon with a friend at a cafe – me holding my newborn and my friend’s dog at her feet – and every passer-by made a coo-ing comment TO THE DOG and ignored my baby. True story.

And then there was the credit card debt, my school loans for USC…

I’d learned a lot about filmmaking, but not enough about life itself. And life was about to kick me in the ass many times over for the next seven years. My year in New Orleans, pregnant and then with a newborn, is worth its own post. I did zero filmmaking other than pretending to all my LA contacts that I hadn’t left at all, freaking out that my thesis film didn’t get into Sundance and not knowing what else to do. I felt like I had a split personality: one personality that was still pursuing my film career in LA, the other as an expectant mom and newlywed in a new city with a lot of debt to pay off. After my son was just born, I screened my thesis with other USC thesis films at the DGA. The DGA!!! After my Sundance rejection, this was my next big hope to getting representation and getting my foothold in the industry.

The day of the DGA screening, I drove from Marina Del Rey (where I was staying with my in-laws) to West Hollywood for the tech check then back to Marina Del Rey to nurse my newborn because he didn’t take a bottle or formula and then back to West Hollywood for the actual screening! That’s almost 6 hours in the car for the 2 round-trips!

Only…nothing happened after the DGA screening. This is not uncommon. We can’t all be outliers. Very few get those out-of-this-world opportunities and many are worthy. And there are many not worthy who just get ridiculously lucky. And what I have seen over the years is that even those who got these amazing opportunities…if you weren’t white or male, it didn’t necessarily mean much. A woman I met recently, Maria Giese, who’s interviewed for the documentary This Changes Everything, was one of these film school darlings, who got representation and a feature film – with STAR talent – that was selected for Cannes (fucking Cannes!)…watched her career get sidelined by sexist hiring practices and no one willing to change the system.

It’s stories like those that make me somewhat grateful I got out of LA before it broke me.

And then Hurricane Katrina hit and we ended up in Houston. More on hurricanes later.

It wasn’t all bad, there were some wonderful moments, but the depression that had started with getting fired turned into a full-fledged identity crisis as I found myself a stay-at-home mom to two young children in the far outskirts suburbs of suburbs of Houston – a city that had little filmmaking going on, and while it had some really interesting elements, it was visually very very ugly. Sorry Houston. There are people who hate Los Angeles, hate the urban sprawl, the traffic, the pretension…the worst that it has to offer. But even when you’re stuck on the highways, the scenery around you is interesting. It tells a story. Some is iconic – like the Hollywood sign, or the Canyons/Hills. There is very little that’s aesthetically pleasing in Houston. Very little interesting architecture, very little natural beauty (in the city), and zero topography.

I’ve had a lot of amazing experiences and opportunities in my life and I’ve grown to recognize the privilege I’ve benefitted from, and this is not a post about my own personal traumas. There were many reasons why I struggled with adulting ranging from a soon-to-be crippling anxiety, family, environment, culture, genetics…but Houston ushered in the birth of my full-realized adult self. I couldn’t run away; I couldn’t go back home to my parents. I mean, I could…but I was tired of that version of myself. The version that expected to get into Sundance and couldn’t deal with the rejection. The version that felt traumatized and victimized, even by my own choices.

I hated Houston for seven years. During that time, I hunkered down and put one foot in front of the other. I joined the board for Southwest Alternate Media Project (SWAMP), a now-41-year-old non-profit dedicated to supporting independent filmmakers and films. I offered my filmmaking skills to a non-profit educating families on pregnancy and parenting options, creating the documentary Everything Begins At B.I.R.T.H. to help with their outreach. I produced 13 similar outreach videos for a local Montessori school that my son went to. I’d film in the various classrooms while a hired babysitter would watch my infant daughter – on site – because I was still nursing and she also didn’t take a bottle or formula. So I’d take production breaks to nurse her and then go back to filming interviews and b-roll of students learning. 13 videos over a year span.

And I felt like a huge failure. I didn’t know how this was all going to come together into anything resembling a career let alone the career I had once thought I was going to have. I remember talking to a friend of mine from USC who DID have a film go to Sundance and she said she felt like a failure because she didn’t have children, and I felt like a failure because I didn’t have a film go to Sundance. It seems that we can’t win, at least not without readjusting what “success” meant.

I wasn’t even sure I wanted to make films anymore. With two little kids, it was a whole lot of work with unreasonable hours for a risky if not usually unrewarding venture. On a desperate whim to do something creative that I could do at home with the kids, I wrote a novel as part of the NaNoWriMo novel-writing challenge that takes place in November and found my inspiration again. I’d been terrified. I didn’t think I could write 50,000 words in 30 days, but I had an idea and I prepped and come Day 1, I’d written over 11,000 words. I’d end up at over 80,000 by Day 16 when I finished the book.

I wasn’t willing to completely abandon filmmaking yet. I’d gone into approximately $80K in debt going to the best filmmaking school in the country using loans I would be paying off until I was over 60 years old. I may have felt like a failure, but I hadn’t given up.

My friend and Program Coordinator for SWAMP, Michelle Mower, was putting together her debut feature film The Preacher’s Daughter and as I helped her in any way that I could, she helped produce a short film experiment for me. An experiment to see if I still liked filmmaking. I honestly expected to hate going into production again. I’d been fairly burned out doing a video each month with a nursing infant at home during the Montessori work. But documentary had always been work for me. Fiction was my passion. So I wrote a short film that I thought would be easy to do. I wanted to collaborate with my close friend from Oberlin, the actress Hannah Cabell, so she came in from NYC for a 2-person film about sisters going through a shift in their relationship over the course of a morning jog. Michelle helped find a crew willing to work for free and we shot over 3 days.

Why did I think that filming 2 people TALKING WHILE RUNNING IN THE OUTSIDE would be easy? The first day was bright and sunny, by the third day it was stormy and overcast. Luckily, we were shooting in sequence and the dramatic lighting worked with the narrative arc. Sound sound sound…ugh.

But I got through production and…I loved it. Loved it! I felt right, in my place, and I wasn’t going to walk away again. Even when it took me almost 3 years to complete it because of technical difficulties. I didn’t expect Sundance. That wasn’t the purpose of the project. And I didn’t need it.

Unfortunately…life was kicking me again as my marriage fell apart and I got a divorce. I tried to stay positive and realistic. I needed to adult…hard. The reality of finding a full-time job in film in Houston was slim. I interviewed for a couple but didn’t get either. I figured it was my time to get back to LA, where I could get a job. Where I had friends. Where I could reclaim some sense of identity. Where my time stuck in traffic would at least be more aesthetically pleasing.

I spent a week in March out in LA meeting with friends, interviewing, scoping things out. Checking out schools and apartment options. By the time I was flying out, my soon-to-be-ex told me he had taken a job in Long Beach and would be leaving Houston at the end of April. We had a house to sell. The housing market, while not as horrific as other places in the US, was suffering after the bubble burst. We had 2 young kids. While being in LA would technically be close enough to Long Beach to have some kind of joint custody, that was clearly not a top priority for my ex. While being in LA would get me back into the industry, the reality of office work was a 10-12 hour day with an LA-sized commute. No schools had after-school programs open past 6pm that I found, so I’d have to hire a nanny (that I couldn’t afford in an already expensive town). And then there was the socializing – the after-dinner drinks. And the Weekend Reads. And the movie going.

I didn’t think I’d ever see my kids. And as a single parent who was bearing 100% of the parenting responsibility at the moment, that was not something I was willing to do. My kids needed at least one of their parents. They were barely 4 and 6.

I tabled the decision to focus on the necessities of adulthood and in the process discovered all the things that I had going for me in this city that I thought I hated. I had friends I could count on. Fall apart with if needed. Go out and have fun with. My kids had friends, a good school, a safe place to live. It was affordable and family friendly. I’d met tons of people through SWAMP, people I respected, people I could count on. I found full-time work, from home, through my father’s company, and when Michelle Mower decided to leave SWAMP to pursue filmmaking full-time, I found part-time work at SWAMP as their new Program Coordinator. Eventually, I started teaching at Houston Community College, where I am now a full-time faculty member in their Filmmaking Department. Things also settled with my ex and things are good with the kids and the co-parenting. I eventually remarried in a Brady Bunch moment and have 2 step-kids who add to the crazy.

I feel like I’ve found a measure of success. And a large part of that is because I did a lot of work on that pesky anxiety and found inner happiness.

I produced a couple of local shorts – Next Exit and Meggan’s Journey which played festivals. Next Exit screened as part of the Cannes Short Film Corner, which brought the next light-bulb moment in my career. Watching the short films and other films screening at Cannes, I realized that I couldn’t play it safe anymore. All of those films, at the highest level, required some kind of risk. Blood in the water.

I left Cannes ready to focus on my own voice as a filmmaker.

To write and direct again.

To not do easy.

To not expect Sundance, to pursue all the festival options.

To say yes and be open.

I started with the short film Acid Test. And even when another devastating hurricane came through the city I lived in, it wasn’t going to kick me down. You can read more about it on my guest blog post at Seed&Spark. And I’m not just interested in my own career as a filmmaker. I’m dedicated to the Houston film community, to my students, to being part of changing the landscape in front of and behind the camera.

I wonder what the next 20 years will bring.

]]>The problem with homehttp://www.jennywaldo.com/2018/11/the-problem-with-home/
Thu, 29 Nov 2018 11:33:40 +0000http://www.jennywaldo.com/?p=891Continue Reading]]>I recently went home to DC to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. It had only been a year since my last visit but overall my trips back to DC have grown infrequent in the last few years. For some reason, this visit felt different. Everything FELT different. And everywhere that I turned I not only saw what was in front of me coupled with visions from memory, but visions of what could have been. Visions from my past dreams of what I thought my future would look like overlaid on the reality of that now-future.

My dad and I rode bikes down to the Potomac River and stopped off at a stark wintery sight at Fletcher’s Boathouse. The boarded up rental house. The beached row boats. All useless and waiting to be used. Hibernating but empty. And this metal ball chained to a tree. Everything felt like a metaphor.

Maybe this is what a mid-life crisis looks like for a writer/filmmaker? I’m constantly envisioning lives, characters, scenarios. Everywhere I look is a possible story or scene. As I walked past the Smithsonian castle on the way to the Hirshhorn, I looked down the walkway with all the flowers and vaguely remembered a time I had walked through and sat there and that merged with a dream/thought I had had years ago when I envisioned what my life would be like to live and work in DC. In my younger years, I had done research work down at the Library of Congress and I used to think about what life would be like to live on Capitol Hill and go to the Eastern Market. And suddenly, I was seeing the future that never was, like my own Sliding Doors movie.

I’ve had the benefit of living and visiting in many different places all over the country and abroad and each has a multitude of dream-mes walking around somewhere in the ether, but the emotional impact felt different in the place where I grew up. The sense of loss greater, and I’ve been thinking about what that actually means to me.

I’m starting to understand what people mean when they say it all goes by so fast. I’m hitting those markers – my kids are no longer in elementary school, I will most likely never have a baby again so those “child-rearing” years are over. My body hasn’t “bounced back” in years. My career is doing well, certainly not where I thought I’d be at this age, but I can’t complain. And while I know I have (or hope to have) decades before me, those milestones of life that we think about when we’re younger – jobs, relationships, kids, where we live, travel, friends, hobbies – I hit them somewhat early and I’m realizing I never really thought about life past the age of 40. At least not until now. Now, I start dreaming about what I’m gonna be like with a walker and white hair and how I’m really going to be a terror because no one can tell me what do to as a 90 year old.

Growing up, I’d been desperate to leave DC. The elitism. The hypocrisy. The difficulties I had with my family. The difficulties I had with myself that I thought a change in location would fix. I hated the bulky white architecture on the Mall. I didn’t feel like I belonged. And yet the city was central to my identity. Outside of DC, I embraced my hometown with pride. It’s a place everyone has some idea about, it’s an interesting place to talk about, and the confusing and convoluted feelings I had about it were easier to deal with elsewhere. Still, it was always “home.”

I married my high school sweetheart. We’d been dating since we were 16. So every time we visited our families, we also got to visit all the places where we first fell in love. All our favorite places that we shared. So much history.

And when I had my first kid, I started to see what DC had to offer. It’s not a towering urban landscape like New York City. It’s not a sprawling one like Los Angeles. The museums are all free. There are trees and rivers and bike paths and public transportation. There are 4 seasons, none of which are that extreme. There are so many good schools, it’s one of the most educated areas in the nation. It’s not densely packed. Good food, interesting people, diversity. It’s easy to travel to other cities and states – mountains and fields and beaches. These are all the best parts of a complicated city and I was lucky to be able to experience those good parts because DC also has a lot of bad.

But when we dream, we dream about the good. We romanticize the ideal. And as a new mom, thinking about all the best things for their kid for the future, I saw what I hadn’t seen before.

And then my marriage fell apart and that link to all those feel-good memories, that person I got to share all that history with, was gone. Going home felt different. Not necessarily less-than. But all the things I looked forward to doing, I didn’t need to do anymore and I didn’t WANT to do them anymore because so much of what I enjoyed doing was wrapped up in what I had enjoyed doing with that other person. And as I moved on with a new relationship, I didn’t want to do those same things with a new partner. Sometimes in my wonderings, I wonder about a world where people date and date, how a visit home and the nostalgic tour of all the favorite places might not bring the same set of conflicted emotions. I don’t want to reminisce about making out with my high school boyfriend when showing my new husband my high school because – oh yeah – that’s my ex we’ll be seeing next week when he picks up the kids. Maybe I just need to get over it, but it’s almost 17 years worth of getting over so forgive me if 8 years on I still feel weird about it. It’s actually easier to do it with the kids because I want them to know there was love that they came from.

And then my parents started getting older and decided to renovate the house in the hopes of getting things “in order.” The only thing that really looks different is the basement because it’s now actually finished and furnished and not used as a dumping ground for everything they don’t know what to do with. And maybe I’ve lived in Texas too long with my enormous square footage, and I’m certainly carrying more weight around so yes my perspective might be off, but my parents’ house feels tiny. Going up and down the stairs I worried.

And while my parents do love to do the nostalgia tour and reminisce, that’s a minefield of potential trauma for me. And while there’s the hope that maybe we’ll come to a new understanding and growth, acknowledgment and healing, I had to give that up a long time ago in order to function and be healthy because all of that was just a dream that is never going to be reality.

But maybe I thought, maybe I still hoped, that it could be. A dream deferred. Is that where I am at this point in life?

]]>RIP William Goldmanhttp://www.jennywaldo.com/2018/11/rip-william-goldman/
Fri, 16 Nov 2018 07:02:01 +0000http://www.jennywaldo.com/?p=886Continue Reading]]>Twenty years ago, I had the extraordinary privilege of meeting the screenwriter William Goldman, who passed away today. His death reminded me of the generosity and respect he afforded a completely green writer and left me with that sense of loss from what could have been.

I don’t even remember what prompted me to write to him. During my studies at Oberlin College, I’d written a screenplay which sparked a desire to pursue filmmaking as a career. I’d been using the Alumni database at the Career Services Center my senior year because I needed to find a place to stay in Los Angeles during my final Winter Term when I would be interning at Mandalay Pictures on the Paramount Lot. I don’t remember how I learned Mr. Goldman was an Alum, but his address was in the database. I was a fan of his work – especially All the President’s Men.

This was back in the days of letters that you wrote on paper, put into an envelope, stamped, and mailed. I was at home in Washington, DC – about 4 hours (give or take 2 hours) from New York City where he lived – and when I received his letter back offering to chat any time I was in NYC, I jumped at the chance.

Mr. Goldman lived on the Upper East Side. I remember walking there, not knowing what to expect. His building had a receptionist (basically) who told me to take the special elevator to the penthouse. The elevator opened directly into his apartment. I had never in my life been in anything like it. My memory tells me he was in what I can only describe as some kind of satiny robe. It wasn’t lewd, he was dressed underneath, maybe you would call it a smoking jacket, but it was long. Thinking back on this in our post-Weinstein reality, it sounds awful, but I didn’t get any kind of weird vibe from him at all. He conveyed an accomplished while slightly eccentric writer vibe. His penthouse was packed with all kinds of interesting decorations and had a terrace garden, something I never knew existed in the upper levels of existence in New York City. We talked for at least an hour about screenwriting and the industry.

He hated LA but thought that everyone who wanted to make it in the industry would have to serve their time there for a while. He confessed that Butch Cassidy was probably the best thing he ever wrote and he mused on what it meant to have a success so early in his career that would never be matched. He credited the GI Bill with helping him fund his writing habit and remarked that it was no wonder why artists came out of wealthy families because you needed money to finance your life so you could focus on your art. He told me to write every day for 3 hours. I think he called it the cave or the hole that all writers had to go into in order to produce and told me that most of what I would write in that time would be crap. A universal truth.

I gave him my first (and only) script I’d ever written, Momentum, about a young woman whose boyfriend dies tragically right around the time she finds out she’s pregnant. A couple of weeks after I met with Mr. Goldman, I received a call back at my parents’ house in DC – he had notes. He told me it was difficult to hang the entire plot around the pregnancy, that there needed to be more going on. I don’t remember the other notes, but I remember feeling like he was both complimentary of my writing ability and encouraging of my pursuits while also offering constructive criticism.

I’ve often thought about him over the last 2 decades and this time he gave to me – a nobody, an aspirant. He had no reason to be so generous and so I think it speaks profoundly of the man he was. With 20 years of filmmaking and now as a film instructor, I cringe at what I offered to this master, but take the lesson that no matter who you meet you treat everyone with respect and offer your time generously.

I was looking forward to having a success under my belt and sending him another letter, maybe in email form this time, thanking him again.

]]>New Music Video!http://www.jennywaldo.com/2018/05/new-music-video-2/
Thu, 10 May 2018 16:42:01 +0000http://www.jennywaldo.com/?p=883Continue Reading]]>The latest in my collaboration with Houston Riot Grrrl band Giant Kitty, the music video I directed for “Disorder Girl” has premiered! It deals with a difficult topic – domestic violence – and the mental prison that so often goes along with it. Thanks to Houston Press premiered the video with a short write-up!

And thank you to Anna Tran, Kristin Massa, and Darla Doshier for their work on the production.

Watch here:

]]>Updateshttp://www.jennywaldo.com/2018/04/updates/
Fri, 20 Apr 2018 15:23:03 +0000http://www.jennywaldo.com/?p=880Continue Reading]]>It has been a busy busy busy busy spring semester. I’m teaching extra courses in Filmmaking at Houston Community College and guest teaching screenwriting again at the High School for Performing and Visual Arts. My short film ACID TEST has continued to have an incredible run in film festivals and its adaptation into a feature film is moving forward with an upcoming table read of the script!

I’ve had a blog post about female anger rattling around in my brain with all the recent developments in the industry and political news, but it’ll have to wait until I’ve got more room in my brain.

]]>Crowdfunding & Festivals in Reviewhttp://www.jennywaldo.com/2017/12/crowdfunding-festivals-in-review/
Sat, 02 Dec 2017 10:14:11 +0000http://www.jennywaldo.com/?p=877Continue Reading]]>It’s been a whirlwind couple of months working on the Seed&Spark crowdfunding campaign to develop ACID TEST into a feature film while also screening the short in festivals like BendFilm in Oregon and the recent Austin Film Festival!

Crowdfunding for the second time around was a whole new adventure, especially given that Hurricane Harvey (and other natural disasters) hit all in the same timeframe. I was invited to contribute a guest blog on Seed&Spark about my experience. Read it here!

As we move into the holiday season, I’m looking forward to diving deep into the feature script and workshopping it in the New Year with my actors.

And make sure you check out ACID TEST’s website for all the latest info on the festivals and reviews!

]]>Article in the Washington Posthttp://www.jennywaldo.com/2017/09/article-in-the-washington-post/
Thu, 14 Sep 2017 15:40:02 +0000http://www.jennywaldo.com/?p=872Continue Reading]]>Recently, I was under mandatory evacuation here in the Houston area because of Hurricane Harvey. The thing is, I came to Houston as a Hurricane Katrina evacuee from New Orleans. This all felt very familiar, yet it’s also something that you never get used to. Knowing how bad it can be can even make everything worse. Read about my recent experience in the Washington Post here. It was an honor to be published in the newspaper I grew up reading as a DC native despite the painful subject matter.

Ultimately, my family and I were very lucky both times where many were not. It takes a community to rebuild and it takes time to regain a sense of normal.

I’ve taken a look at some of the comments on the WaPo site, mainly the ones that said I should move and was stupid to stay in a hurricane-prone region and a city developed to flood. I’ve lived in the DC area. I’ve lived outside of Cleveland, OH. I’ve lived in Los Angeles. I’ve lived in New Orleans. I’ve lived abroad in London and Prague. I have friends in all the states, and around the world. I can’t find a safe, perfect place to live. Can you? Every place has its ups and downs, its pros and cons. And no one, NO ONE, can ever anticipate things aptly named “an act of God.” Disasters. Emergencies. Terrorists. Disgruntled employees. Violent husbands. Psychotic mothers. Careless teens. No place is untouched by these things and if they are then I’m sure they face other difficulties.

When your life, your family, your work, are rooted in a location, in a community, it’s not so easy to walk away. There’s value in those places and, more importantly, in those people. With New Orleans, I’d only lived there 1 year, so it was much easier to walk away. I hadn’t rooted yet. But it’s been 12 years that I’ve lived in Houston. Grown to love this place and the people in it. To panic and flee would be an insult. Like not valuing what I have and chasing something elusive. “Safety.” That makes me think of the family who evacuated from my neighborhood to stay with friends in Kingwood, only to get slammed by the storm and rescued off the roof. I could move somewhere “safe” and get run over by a car. Y’all think I’m crazy…right back at ya’.

[That will be the first and last time I ever use the word “ya’ll”]

]]>Follow. Share. Contribute.http://www.jennywaldo.com/2017/09/follow-share-contribute/
Thu, 14 Sep 2017 15:21:03 +0000http://www.jennywaldo.com/?p=866Continue Reading]]>Now that ACID TEST premiered in the film festival circuit (more news on upcoming screenings soon!), my thoughts are going to the “what’s next” question. Over the next two years as the short makes its rounds in the festivals and we look to distribution options on platforms such as Seed&Spark, I want to keep the work and efforts we all put in together going. So I’m crowdfunding to expand ACID TEST into a feature film!

Recently, Seed&Spark announced a “Hometown Heroes Rally” – an initiative where they’ve partnered with the Duplass brothers to help feature films find their audience, funds, and recognition. In order to qualify, filmmakers need to crowdfund for their scripted feature films over 30 days between September 12 and October 13 to raise at least $7500 and gain at least 500 followers. Finalists will pitch their projects to Mark and Jay Duplass for the chance to have them executive produce the film and up to $25,000 cash for production! The focus is on regional filmmaking and here in Houston, we’ve got that in spades. Texas is one of the chosen production areas, which makes sense since both brothers attended UT Austin.

I already have a draft of a feature adaptation of ACID TEST but it needs a lot of work. I jumped at the chance of raising development funds through this Hometown Heroes campaign.

In the midst of planning this crowdfunding campaign, Hurricane Harvey hit and I thought about cancelling it. How can I ask for money for a film when so many people need money just to survive? But I know Houston will recover, is already recovering, coming together in such an amazing way to help each other out. This campaign is one step toward bringing the larger film industry to Houston, creating jobs and opportunities, and I feel like if I cancel the campaign, I’m letting Harvey win.

I want this to be an opportunity for all of us. Incentives include film consultations and interviews with the heroes we have here in Houston. This is a Hometown Rally for Houston with an eye toward a stronger future.

The short film ACID TEST always lived within a larger story about a dysfunctional family who loves each other while managing to do everything wrong. The short film introduces us to Jenny, her family, and her friends, and the absurdly dramatic rebellion she adopts to expand her universe. The feature film gives us the broader context of why she’s rebelling and explores the aftermath of this moment where she seems to be worse off than where she started. Through the eyes of Jenny, we experience these tests in life that challenge who we are, what we want, what we think, and what we can do to make our mark in the world.

The Hometown Heroes Rally supports any phase of production, so I want to use the funds to develop and workshop a feature script that’s as kickass as the short we just made. With the funds, I will bring my actors back for a weekend workshop and cast the rest of the speaking roles for a table read. I’m also raising funds for script consultation, location scouting, budgeting and scheduling consultation so that the feature film ACID TEST will be ready to approach investors and move on to production.

FOLLOW the feature film project page on Seed&Spark. (It’s FREE!) Followers are more important than contributions because the top ten projects with the most followers get to pitch!

SHARE the link on your social media along with every post to help expand our network of followers

CONTRIBUTE if you can. For followers of the short film, $5 gets you a link to the finished film as you help continue its development into a feature. 600 followers at $5 gets us $3000, nearly half of the goal! You helped us make an incredible short film that I am so very proud of, and I would love to have the opportunity to pitch the larger story to the Duplass Brothers and bring the larger film industry to Houston to build our film infrastructure. $15 gets you the amazing poster Sharad designed for our premiere!

I need your help to get to $7500 and 500+ followers. It’s a rally. It’s a competition. It’s 30 days. It ends October 13th, the day we screen at BendFilm Festival in Oregon. So many wonderful things going on. Let’s keep it rolling. Let’s do something amazing and fun together.

Thank you.

]]>ACID TEST to BendFilm!http://www.jennywaldo.com/2017/09/acid-test-to-bendfilm/
Mon, 11 Sep 2017 14:01:11 +0000http://www.jennywaldo.com/?p=861Continue Reading]]>My short film ACID TEST will be in competition at BendFilm Festival this October! So excited to attend, and it was great, welcome new in the midst of Hurricane Harvey when I was under mandatory evacuation. Luckily my house escaped flooding, but my heart goes out to everyone effected by Harvey and now Irma. Fingers crossed that Jose and any others keep their distance!